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sports and toronto

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Here’s another Maple Leaf loving blogger who thinks the world revolves around the blue and white hockey losers.

Hear me out though, before you decide.

Since the buds exited the hockey world, is it just me or has the sports coverage in Toronto completely fallen off?

I’ve been listening to sports radio (podcasts). I’ve been reading papers.

Maybe it’s just me, but the compelling stories have all disappeared. Where’s the intrigue?

The Blue Jays are in full season mode. I am not seeing or hearing compelling content on the Jays at all.

Honestly, forget the blogosphere where is the compelling content?

NHL playoffs. The games have been good. USA numbers are up. Coverage in Canada? Yawn. Torts is an ass….yadda yadda yadda.

Did anyone else notice the stark difference between the Toronto Sports Media coverage of Hunter’s decision to leave the Capital and the scribes in DC? The Toronto media painted this as doom and gloom for the Caps. The DC scribes, the guys who actually spent the time around the team? Not only to be expected, but not a huge loss either.

With all due respect to those who cover the NBA. I am not seeing it there either. Haven’t read or heard anything I don’t get anywhere else.

What is it?

Has the media mailed it in as the Leafs are out of the picture? Is sports just that boring these days? Is it just me?

21 Comments

Mm… I think it’s because you’re mostly a leafs fan (I believe), so you’re less interested when they’re off. A perspective thing. Dont get me wrong the leafs are obviously the media focus. But, personally I feel like there’s tons going on (I’m not into the NHL playoffs either though)..

I’m more of a jays fan so I’ve been following things much more closely in the last couple months (I’d be happy to erase the last few days though.. Ugh).

Yes it’s just you because you piss Leaf blue and you miss seeing Brian Burke’s face in the paper every day. What compelling story was there when the Leafs were playing? Other than they sucked again and Burke said dumb thing after dumb thing?

You have what has been (so far) a decent NBA playoffs. The MLB season, despite the Jays playing like the ball is Kryptonite, has had a ton of great stories (no hitters, Josh Hamilton, The O’s, The Nats). The NHL playoffs have had a TON of coverage and if there isn’t a more compelling story than the Kings right now I don’t know what is.

But don’t worry, after the playoffs end I’m sure Burke will sign another washed up free agent and you’ll have your compelling story.

The sports media here are often lazy, knowing very little outside of hockey (and the standard stuff). Two radio stations are great and all that, but it’s rather useless if they both race to the bottom and see who can fill the hours with the most hockey talk.

A different case in point: Blair won’t talk tennis because he thinks it is a country-club sport. He’s partially right, but he uses this line as an excuse to be ignorant about the sport – much like other sports reporters haven’t taken the 5 minutes that are needed to learn how the ranking system works.

I get upset when the sports media don’t show enough passion/interest to even learn about the sports they need to cover once in a while. We follow sports because they interest us, and MSMers are getting paid to do a job that a lot of people on this site would gladly do for free.

Another senior moment from Bob. Top of the hour, when he started the show, running through his guest list, had Terry Tata coming up, but Bob pronounced it Terry TaaTaa instead of Tayta which it is.

I can accept senior moments from Bob, since they are coming more often than ever, but this one was quite astonishing. Tata umpired from 1973 – 1999, in other words, during Bob’s peak baseball following interest, and he was a pretty well known baseball umpire, one whom any moderate baseball fan would heave heard of and know his name. Yet here was Bob butchering it off the top.

I have posted previously how Bob needs a lot more hand holding from his producers and fellow guests for name recognition, and I again am just hoping that this is just part of the natural aging process.

I’m a pretty huge baseball fan, and to be honest I would have no idea how to pronounce Terry Tata. Maybe as an Expos fan (right?) you are familiar with him because he was an NL ump. I don’t think people on Toronto would be familiar.

I did not think of it that way Daniel, but you may be onto something. I certainly was and still am a huge Expo fan, in fact, will be driving into Montreal Mid-June for the big celebration honouring the ’81 Expos and paying tribute to Gary Carter, while also promoting baseball coming back to Montreal in some capacity. I am even going to a VIP cocktail party prior to the dinner so I can really talk up close to my childhood baseball heroes.

Yeah, I guess if you didn’t know either I can cut Bob some slack on it. I would have a hard time knowing all of the AL umps back then also, although I did think that Tata was one of the better known umps, regardless of the league he was umping in.

I believe Terry Tata has been on McCown’s show many times so I would think McCown should know how to pronounce his name

Hey Another Steve………….regarding your comment about Blair and tennis, you might find this amusing…………..Blair blocked me on Twitter a couple of months ago when I politely suggested to him that he may be wrong when he says that tennis is a waste of time

“MLSEL owns teams in the NHL, NBA and MLS — and combined the Maple Leafs, Raptors and soccer Reds sport the fewest number of wins of any similar North American market place. To date, Toronto teams have won 58 of 156 games played this season. That’s an organisational winning percentage of .371. That’s a disgrace by an definition.”

Former Raptor coaches: Brendan Malone, Darrell Walker, Butch Carter, Lenny Wilkens, Kevin O’Neill, Sam Mitchell, Jay Triano. Did any of these men get head coaching jobs after Toronto. Only Wilkens, I think, and only because the Knicks are run by that wack job James Donlon(who hired Isiah).

TFC managers: Mo Johnson, John Carver, Chris Cummings, Preki. I don’t think any of these guys are head coaches anywhere. And who will hire Aaron Winter after this year’s debacle.

And I don’t care about how good a job MLSE does making money. Anybody who owns the Leafs will make money, and the Raptors get $30 million a year from David Stern for US tv rights, which has nothing to do with MLSE.
As for the MLSE condos, how much business acumen did that take? Everybody and their grandmother is building condos – look around.

When MLSE tries to get original they do it in morally disgusting ways, ie.
Luke’s Troops and those camouflage Raptor uniforms. Do you think Schenn thought this up? I’m not blaming him, he was a 19 year old trying to make it in the NHL. Some suits probably got their hooks into him and concocted this “charity” to burnish his and the teams’ image.

Maybe next season the Raptors can splash some red paint on the camouflage jerseys to make them more authentic. Yes paint costs money but they can double the price of the jerseys and increase their profit margin. It’s sickening to manipulate the respect everybody feels for the troops to goose their bottom line. There’s nothing stopping MLSE for helping these people anonymously, buy they want to be seen doing it. Goodwill in on the balance sheets.

I hope when Rogers/Bell take over they get rid of Tom Anselmi and all the old guard who were involved in these decisions.

The latest bit of nonsense is to apologize to the fans for their teams’ ineptitude. Hey MLSE take your apologies and your camouflage uniforms, fold them five ways and stick them where the moon don’t shine.

Daniel, I heard yesterday that the Jays are likely going to use Buffalo for their AAA affiliate, as the Pirates are going to walk away after this season, and the Jays are desperate to get out of Vegas, which due to geographical distance from Toronto, the high altitude and rarified air and awful pitching as a result was a horrible place to develop pitching talent and it also makes all the offensive stats suspect. The Jays have been using their AA affiliate in Harrisburg I believe to send their best prospects as a result.

Kamlesh, for the Raptors coaches, you are so right and that is why even though we likely screwed up our draft choice, it was well worth it to finally get a head coach who right now 2/3 of the NBA would hire in a heartbeat.

If there are 2 wild cards in each league why does every paper and website show only the number one wild card team on top and the next one as a couple games back instead of the top 2 non division leaders as current wild card leaders??

I’m wondering if there’s any team that benefits from having a farm team in Las Vegas? Like, obv it doesn’t work well for the Jays, but does it work well for any team? Because, it seems like you can’t trust anything that happens there because pitchers will always look bad and hitters will always look good. Maybe the Rockies? But the Rockies have that new thingie in their stadium that balances the air pressure or whatever now right?

Is there a team that IS a good fit? Or are the 51s every team’s last choice for a farm team?